


when you think you've tried every road

by firstaudrina



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Hotel
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-11-15
Packaged: 2018-05-01 16:51:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5213513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Normally Tristan would brush off someone eyeing his ass but this is different, somehow – like Liz looked at him once, and wanted to keep looking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when you think you've tried every road

Tristan is dumb. It's whatever. He knows it, it's not a secret, he's heard it from every teacher and boss and partner and magazine. Whatever.

One day he's banging around the hotel looking for trouble or excitement or _something_ , no one left to entertain him. The Countess is up to her elbow in Will Drake, pun intended, and no ghosts are stirring for Tristan's whining today. There's only Liz Taylor at the check-in desk, like always.

He leans in on impulse, leans all the way over the counter until he's supported on it and his feet aren't quite on the floor, just so he can get into Liz's space, craning around to look at the page of her book. His necklace _tinks_ against the counter.

"What's that?" he asks in that dumb dull frat voice, too loud in the lobby on purpose because Tristan likes to make noise. He looks up at Liz through his bangs with a little smirk. He likes to flirt even when he isn't interested; he likes the attention. But something in Liz's expression presses the mute button on Tristan's bullshit, something in the wry twist of her mouth, that seen-it-all arch to her brow.

"Proust," she says. Just that, no sarcasm or explanation, no expectation that Tristan wouldn't know what that is. Which he doesn't. 

Tristan slides back to his feet, landing with a little thump. "Any good?"

Liz looks at him for a long moment, but she looks him right in the eye, nowhere else. Then she closes the book and hands it over. "You tell me."

Tristan looks at the book there, held aloft in her hand, the perfect ovals of her red nails biting into the soft cover. "Aren't you reading it?"

"I've read it before." She gives the book a little shake so Tristan will take it. Which he does, tucking it under his arm. It feels weighty and substantial. Tristan doesn't remember the last time he read a book that long, or if he ever has. 

"Thanks." He tips his head in a little nod and then smirks; he can't ever turn it off a hundred percent. "Miss Taylor."

Liz snorts, already pulling another novel out from behind the desk. "You're terrible, Zoolander."

 

 

Tristan is used to people looking at him. That's all they do, look at him. That's all he's good for: standing around like a mannequin, letting people poke and prod at him. Designers were the worst; they treated Tristan as though he was made of plastic, a Ken doll. They used him for demonstration, tugged at his clothes to talk about fabric and seams, forgetting there was a person underneath. They spoke like he couldn't hear them, even when they were talking about him. Especially then.

When Tristan catches Liz giving him the old up-and-down, he laughs – not because he's not used to it, not because he doesn't get it all the time, but because there's no crossover between them. The Countess rarely looks directly at any of the people who work for her, and Tristan has gotten used to doing the same.

But Tristan goes with it the way people do who can't resist being double-dared. He tugs at the mostly unbuttoned opening of his shirt and grins, preening. "Like what you see? Most people do."

Liz rolls her eyes but she smiles ever so slightly too. "You young people," she tsks. "So brazen. So sure of yourselves."

Tristan hooks his fingers in his belt loops and lets momentum drag the waist of his pants an inch lower. "Is that a yes?"

"If you _must_ know, my eye was merely drawn by that hideous shirt. That pattern! Those colors!" Liz gives an all over full body shudder, face twisting up in a sour grimace. "You'd think someone paid to wear clothes would know how to pick them out a little better."

Tristan looks down at the shirt. "I just put on whatever's clean."

Liz sighs dramatically. "Of course you do."

Tristan thinks it might have been the first time he ever noticed Liz Taylor checking him out because usually Liz looks him right in the eye. Normally Tristan would brush off someone eyeing his ass but this is different, somehow – like Liz looked at him once, and wanted to keep looking.

 

 

"So how'd you like the book, hotshot?"

Tristan is bounding across the lobby, sent out on an errand to find someone to snack on and bring home, but he stops then, whipping his sunglasses off. He laughs. "You talk like my grandma."

"What a flattering statement! Something every woman longs to hear," Liz says, pure sarcasm. "Well?"

Tristan shifts his weight from foot to foot. "I didn't finish it."

Liz waits for more.

"I don't think I got it," Tristan says finally.

His concentration is different now than it was before, better and worse by turns. His patience is a fickle thing and sometimes there's nothing that satiates him, nothing that soothes the restless itch. Any time he does apply himself to a task, it's with a clear focus he never knew before. But he still couldn't get into that fucking book.

"Happens," is all Liz says. Then she pauses for the span of a breath. "If you ever wanted, you could come by the bar and we could have a chat about it."

Tristan looks at her. 

"Yeah," he says. "Okay."

That night Tristan picks a woman with heavy eyeliner and too much jewelry. He feels Liz's eyes on him the entire time he pulls the other woman across the way to the elevator. 

 

 

Tristan lingers and hovers along the open upper levels of the hotel, watching the bar for a while before he goes down. He wants it to be empty.

"You spend all your time over here serving cocktails to ghosts?"

"And blood to bloodsuckers," Liz answers without missing a beat. 

"Shit, yeah?" Tristan hops onto one of the stools with interest, knees tucked under him for added height, leaning over too far again, leaning in. "Got the good stuff?"

"That's all I've got." Liz throws a little flick of a glance Tristan's way, barely anything but the flutter of false eyelashes and the glitter of lavender lids. "Are you prepared for book club, Mr. Duffy?"

Liz moves behind the bar twisting the tops off bottles and pouring little splashes of this or that into a steel shaker. She has a bedazzled cap on tonight, a shawl that keeps slipping over her shoulders. It occurs to Tristan that he's never stood beside Liz, never been near her without some hulking piece of furniture between them clearly delineating who belonged where. He doesn't like it.

"Yes, ma'am," he says like a dutiful student, but also like a dutiful student in a porno. He lets his teeth toy with his bottom lip, expression playful and bold. He suddenly wants to ask what Liz was like before the Hotel Cortez, how Liz came here, why she stayed. 

Liz takes the book back from him. "You _underlined_ , you fiend," she gasps. "If you weren't so handsome, I'd –"

But she doesn't finish, so Tristan is left to challenge: "What?"

He sort of wants Liz to take him up on the joke because he's not really sure that he's joking.

The look she gives him is inscrutable but still somehow amused. "Wouldn't you like to know."

 

 

It's sometime after that that the current between them changes. It's not a big thing. It's not a different smell in the air or a pulse pounding like a schoolgirl; it's nothing the Countess would notice. It's just…different, in this way Tristan can't put his finger on. It used to be that they treated each other like decoration, separate fixtures of the hotel that were so established there was no need to acknowledge them. Everyone at the Cortez was like that, unless they were slitting your throat. 

But now Tristan starts straightening up as the elevator plunges downward, alert and expecting; now he knows Liz will be looking at the elevator as soon as it dings its arrival, and maybe before. Now Tristan will look right at her when the doors open and she will be looking right back at him. 

And she'll smile.

 

 

 

Tristan isn't very good at playing the waiting game. He has never been a person with great stores of patience. More and more of the Countess' time is taken up with tricking an erection out of Will Drake, and Tristan starts lurking around the lobby. He starts getting excited about it, waiting for the Countess to do herself up and dismiss him, then making himself walk slow to the door, down the hall, into the elevator. But then he presses the button about fifteen times, impatient, and rushes out as soon as it hits the ground floor.

"Little puppy not so suited to eternity?" Liz wonders. "You're going to have to pick up a hobby."

Tristan is perched up on the counter, Liz to his left just behind him. "I used to steal shit and take pills," he offers. 

Liz chastises, "Neither of those is a hobby."

Tristan looks over his shoulder to grin at her. "What, you want me to take up knitting? Interior design? Watercolors?"

"Don't get smart, young man."

"No one's ever accused me of that." Tristan tips back far enough that he can precariously balance while reaching in to rifle through whatever it is Liz keeps behind the desk. "You got a whole library or something back here?"

He gets a stinging little slap to the wrist for his trouble. "Hasn't anyone ever taught you not to rummage through a lady's things?"

"Yeah, but –" Tristan twists around and lands lightly on his feet like a cat, only this time he's behind the desk too. "I don't learn lessons."

"You're not supposed to be back here." There's something just a little nervous in Liz then. Girlish. Her whole body gets all tense, her fingers fluttering at her throat.

"Rules are hard for me too." A little smile quirks his lips, and it's mirrored briefly on Liz's face. She's seated on a high stool, but even without it she'd be taller than him, and Tristan likes looking up at her, feeling coy. 

"You really are a terrible fl–" Liz starts, but she doesn't get the rest of it out because Tristan surges up and kisses her, enough energy behind it to make the stool tilt back dangerously. Liz's arms go right around Tristan to prevent a fall but as the kiss deepens she just seems to be holding on to hold on. Tristan catches her around the middle, solid and a little bony under his hands, and doesn't know how to stop kissing, never seems to know how to stop anything. 

But eventually Liz breaks it, pushing him away, and the stool thumps back onto all four of its legs. "Terrible," she breathes. "Terrible flirt."

Tristan's fingertips touch the brooch at her throat and then trail down her chest, all chiffon and velvet. "Yeah," he agrees thoughtlessly before leaning back in – and then his phone goes off, a little spell-breaking buzz. He looks; it's the Countess. Tristan smiles at Liz again. "Tease too," he adds.

"At least he owns it," Liz murmurs. Her lipstick has gone vague, a smudged coral halo. 

Tristan goes up to the penthouse but some part of him is still thirteen floors down, breaking rules.

 

 

Sex happens, as it usually does for Tristan, pretty easily.

Now he always slips behind the front desk when he knows Donovan's mom is elsewhere. Liz pretends to ignore him but the tension is thrumming tight between them and she'll sit there with her spine straight as a ruler, pretending to read but never turning a page. Tristan will touch her in soft, fleeting ways. Fingers barely brushing, his hand will move up the back of her arm, elbow to shoulder. He will touch the bare nape of Liz's neck; the vulnerable tremble of her pulse; the jewel hanging from her earlobe. 

Finally, she says, "What are you doing?" with clear huffy irritation. 

"Teasing," Tristan says before he bends to kiss her neck. His hand eases up her thigh, dragging the hem of her skirt up a little with it. "Does it bother you?"

"Define 'bother.'"

"Make you…frustrated?" Tristan leaves another kiss on the very edge of her jaw; there is so little available bare skin to put his mouth to. "Nervous?"

"You have quite the high opinion of yourself," Liz says, and this time she's the one who kisses him. And again it's like – Tristan doesn't know, like being swept up tornado-style, like how it must feel for the people he kills. Taken over. Different, somehow, than anything Tristan has known before.

"You got a room?" he murmurs. "Or do you live in the lobby?"

Liz is looking at him again, curious and intent. Her hands are learning the shape of his jaw. "I do," she says. "I imagine you're asking to see it."

"If you want me to," Tristan says.

Liz folds her hands, fingers interlocking, and brings them to her mouth, head bowed in consideration. Thinking about it so deep. It makes Tristan laugh, rolling his eyes.

"You want to," he says.

"Mm." She observes him. "But should I?"

"There's no point asking that if you want something," Tristan tells her with a shrug. "What's the worst that could happen?"

"Oh, my dear boy." Liz finally slides off the stool. She puts out an aged and peeling _back in 5!_ sign and then grabs a handful of his shirt to pull him along. "You have _no_ idea."

Tristan moves up close behind her, hands on her hips. "I got a couple."

 

 

Later they lie in the crummy hotel sheets and share a cigarette.

"I have the distinct feeling," Liz says, "that this was a very beautiful, very tender mistake."

Tristan puffs little smoke rings, which he remembers learning in the parking lot outside school in tenth grade from a senior who'd repeated the year twice over. "That's usually what people say about me. Except without the tender part."

Liz's knuckles pass over Tristan's cheek, back and forth. "Don't sell yourself short."

Tristan turns his head and they're looking at each other, faces on the same pillow. Eyeliner swoops crazily on one side of her face. Liz is looking him right in the eye, like always. "Selling myself's all I do," he says.

"Not here you don't," Liz says. "In here, this room, it's just about giving. Remember that."

The funny thing with Liz is that it never seems like bullshit. Whatever she says just feels real.

"I will," Tristan tells her, a promise. "I will."

 

 

Tristan comes down early in the evening; the Countess is soaking in the bath. "I said I was coming down for cigarettes. I got like five minutes."

"Ooh la la, and they say romance is dead." 

Liz has reading glasses on today and she looks something of the glamorous librarian, especially with the haughty way she holds herself. They get in the way when Tristan cups her face and kisses her, glasses getting all bumped and smudged. He plucks them off and tosses them away carelessly, laughs at Liz's futile tsking _oh!_

"You're very troublesome," Liz murmurs, fond and exasperated.

Tristan smirks at her and folds to his knees, hands already sliding up her skirt. "Tell me if you still think that in five minutes."

Liz rakes her fingers through his hair. "Scouts' honor," she breathes. "I promise."

 

 

 

"Will you get mad if I ask dumb questions?"

Tristan watches from the bed as Liz fixes her makeup in the mirror. She swept out of bed and into a marabou trimmed robe almost immediately after. She does that a lot. Now she's wiping at the mouth Tristan kissed red, attempting to make herself look untouched. Like it never happened.

She meets Tristan's gaze in the mirror. "Depends. What's the question?"

"Why d'you always leave as soon as we're done?"

Whatever Liz had been expecting him to ask, it wasn't that. Her face takes on a blank kind of surprise. "I have to get back to the desk."

Tristan arches an eyebrow. "What, for the hundreds of guests knocking down the door?" 

Liz laughs softly. "Because that's where I go and that's where I stay. That's my job."

"And upstairs, with her, that's mine?" He says it like a question but it feels less and less like one as the days go by. He knows Donovan was with her for years, decades, but it's barely been months and Tristan –

Eternity is looking long, let's just say that.

"I thought you were in _love_ ," Liz goads, dragging the last word out into two syllables. 

Tristan shrugs, says moodily, "I don't know what that is."

Liz laughs again, another quiet and achey laugh, full of sympathy. "Oh _honey_. You're so young." She looks over her shoulder. "Luckily you have a lot of time to figure yourself out."

Miffed, Tristan says, "I know some stuff, you know." 

So soft, in response: "I know, honey."

But Tristan continues, getting heated, "I know when people are using me. They do it all the time. Because they're bored or they're lonely. Because they want to be excited. I know she just wanted to get rid of _him_ and I came along at the right time. And, like, yeah, I get something out of it too." He stubs out his cigarette, his passion extinguishing as quick as it came. "Mostly."

"I didn't mean it like that," Liz says gently.

Tristan nods. "I just mean – I like being here. I like being with you. That's something I know." 

Liz makes a nearly inaudible sound; Tristan can't tell if it's a sigh or a laugh.

"Mm, you are a dangerous boy." She says it almost to herself, with disbelief, but before Tristan can inquire further, Liz is crawling back into bed. "Alright, dangerous boy. I suppose I can keep the lobby on ice a little longer."

Tristan folds her into his arms and presses her back against the sheets – not silk or satin or Egyptian cotton, just the coarse overused sheets of the Hotel Cortez, rendered somehow dear. 

 

 

On the Countess' arm, Tristan makes the slow walk down to the elevator. He hands her in before following and pressing the button like her personal bellboy. She looks perfect, she looks beautiful; together they are a stylish matched set, ready to draw victims in like flies to honey. 

The elevator is old, and it jerks a little as it shudders from floor to floor. Sometimes the lights flash in and out. Already, they don't have much to say to each other on the ride. 

Tristan is antsy, eager, the whole way down. "You must be hungry, darling," the Countess says, patting his arm. 

Hunger is a word for it.

As soon as the doors part, Tristan looks and finds Liz looking back, her reading glasses on and face half-obscured by her book. But her eyes are undeniably on him, her waiting gaze riveted. Relief washes over Tristan like cool water even though he knew she would be looking. He never had a doubt.

Tristan brings his free hand up to his lips in a casual kiss. Liz lowers her book, and she smiles.


End file.
